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I learned about the Aristotelean intellectual virtue of phronesis along with the related term episteme a few years back from Kathryn Montgomery in discussions about her book How Doctors Think. Episteme is the scientific rationality we are all quite familiar with. Phronesis is usually translated “practical wisdom” and is the kind of rational skill doctors […]

I’ve just read Andrew Lippman and David Reed’s paper on Viral Communications. It’s quite insightful. Two things:

I’ve said it before, but “Intelligence at the Leaves” for currency is what the open money project is all about. Currency is the centralized communication tool that needs to undergo the same process that Lippman and Reed […]

On this July 4th, I’m thinking that God has already blessed America, many times over, with great natural resources, with a powerfully and deep intellectual, spiritual, and political heritage that is the product of the coming together of many strains of human history. We are a blessed melting of many metals that make an alloy […]

Here’s the power-point version of the presentation on open money I gave at the local currency preconference to the BALLE gathering in Burlington last month. The presentation came after a full day of folks like Bernard Lietaer and Tom Greco excellently setting stage by explaining how our current monetary system is both unstable and the […]

Below is part of a talk I gave at the E. F. Schumacher Society seminar Tools for Change.
I’m assuming that at least one of the reasons why you are all here because you understand that the current economic order isn’t leading us down a healthy path. This is pretty easy to explain and to […]

In March I participated in a retreat that is somewhat hard for me to describe. It’s hard because I fear being judged. So, to my more materialist friends I want to describe it as an experiment in developing the practices of collective intelligence and collective wisdom and stick to the intellectual content. […]

“Power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites-polar opposites-so that love is identifiedwith the resignation of power, and power with the denial of love. We’ve got to get this thing […]

The open source movement is, I think, the tip of the iceberg of a fundamental sea change in human thought that is swirling all around us. I had been emailing with a friend about how Quakerism seemed to me to embody in a religion,the principles of open source software because (I wrote) “it handles […]

The City of Ember is a young adult novel that is a fantastic allegory for spiritual awakening, though I have no idea if it was intended as such. The story is of a girl who lives in an underground and completely self-contained city created by the “Builders.” The population of the city knows […]

Since mutual credit money is truly valueless, it cannot BE a unit of measure. It must USE a unit of measure. This means that there must be something with which to set the price of things. You could use chickens or bales of tobbacco or kilowats, or hours as your unit of measure in which […]

For that last 2 years I’ve begun a process of examining perhaps one of the most fundamental ways that I “participate in the consumer economy” and that is simply my use of money, specifically US dollars. Before this period money seemed primarily mundane. Money was just a practical thing about living life. It’s there, and […]

Michael & Eric are walking down the road talking about what people will do for money. Michael sees a steaming pile of dog poop and says: “Eric, I’ll give you 20 grand if you eat some of that.” Eric thinks, wow good deal, and does. Michael says “ok, I owe you 20k.” A little while […]

The FLOSS movement has questioned (or at least provided an alternative to) private ownership of software. One can, on very similar grounds, question private ownership of land (and historically the followers of Henry George have). Recently the E. F. Schumacher Society has published its work on forming community land trusts including actual legal documents that […]

This little book is very interesting in that it is a sandwich of extremely cogent and clear understanding of the relationship of money and economics to spirituality and human values, with a filling of a very problematic practical solution. He gets right the fact that our current money system is one design out of many […]

In hell you are sitting at a sumptuous banquet but your arms are broken and in a cast and though with your fork you can pick up food but you can’t bend your arms, so you can’t put it in your mouth! In heaven, everything is exactly the same, but you just feed the person […]

This sprawling work requiresmuch more than a small description here, which I will do some time (probably as so many others have), but I’ve gotta gripe about it. I wish Mr. Wilber were a better writer, or he would let an editor fix his incredibly repetitious prose. Many people have told me that Wilber is […]

I have a real soft spot for a good graphic novel now and again, and this one really hit the spot. The story is interesting, the characters are amazingly engaging, and the art is just fantastic. What’s most amazing about Bone, is that it doesn’t takes an unusual position of litterary self-awarenes. It doesn’t take […]

Back in 1995, when I was madly collecting web resources for the second edition of my book, The Internet Directory (by the way, don’t buy it unless you are an Internet historian), I kept coming across people’s personal jounals. I read all kinds of stuff that to me seemed incredibly inappropriate to be made public […]